MAYA YAC celebrates 10 years!
May 2026
We’re delighted to share that Mick Aston’s Young Archaeologists (known as ‘MAYA’) in Somerset have recently celebrated 10 years since the launch of the club! In this blog branch leader Liz shares some highlights from the club’s first 10 years and tells us about a recent fieldtrip to celebrate, featuring prehistoric crafts and a very impressive cake…
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since we first launched MAYA back in April 2016! Mick Aston’s Young Archaeologists (MAYA) was set up in 2016 at the request of and in memory of Prof Mick Aston who was very keen to start a YAC branch for Somerset. MAYA has been very fortunate over the years to have the support of a wide variety of archaeologists and volunteers enabling us to offer our members some amazing opportunities.
Some of the highlights include visiting Stonehenge with Julian Richards, excavating on Roman and Bronze Age sites, listening to the tale of Beowulf around the fire pit in a Saxon longhall, and visiting an exact replica of a complete Roman villa. We have also had lots of opportunities to take part in practical activities such as pottery making, Saxon wood carving, making and laying mosaic tesserae, and geophysical surveying.
In 2024 MAYA took part in the YAC Impact Study to see how being part of MAYA has had a positive impact on our members. We are very grateful to all the people who have given up their time and expertise over the years to make MAYA such a success.
We wanted to go somewhere really special to celebrate, so where better than Avalon Archaeology Park where we have had so many amazing sessions over the years. The session was run for us by Marc Cox who manages the Park. He had prepared two great activities for us – painting the Iron Age round house using authentic methods, and woodworking with Neolithic and Bronze Age axes.
We started out making the paint for the round house by mixing different colours of ground ochre with egg yolk and milk curds. We then made our own paint brushes from willow and horse hair. Mark had sketched out a design on the outside of the round house for us to decorate. Half the group did this while the others had a tour around the rest of the Archaeology Park, looking at the amazing Roman dining room and Saxon Long Hall. We then swapped over so everyone could take part in all activities.
After this we stopped to celebrate our 10th anniversary with a special celebration cake! A big thank you to Pam for making this for us.
For the last activity Marc handed round a variety of flint, copper and bronze axes. We then took it in turns to use the copper axe to chop a silver birch tree trunk in half. Marc explained that this method would have been used to construct the prehistoric wooden trackways found across the Somerset Levels.
A big thank you to Marc for organising such a fantastic session for our special celebration and to everyone else who has supported MAYA over the past ten years!